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Radiant Community Arts’ mural class has been working on a new large-scale work in Pearl Alley, off 11th Avenue, on the side of the Public Defender Services of Lane County building.
Public defenders and new community murals do not often occupy the same spaces.
But in Eugene’s Pearl Alley, the wall of the Public Defender Services of Lane County is now home to a friendly possum; the outstretched branches of a tree; bright, colorful flowers; and — on Wednesday mornings — the class of artists hard at work to bring the new mural to life. The work is thanks to a mural class from Radiant Community Arts, which has its studio and gallery space in the building across the alleyway.
Rebranded last year from the Oregon Supported Living Program Arts and Culture Center, Radiant started specifically as an arts program for adults with disabilities. But the mural class, like all Radiant classes, is a mixed-ability setting. Both students with disabilities and people who just wanted to be a part of a large-scale project have spent the last 10 weeks brainstorming, designing and now painting a mural made up of individual pieces, all geared to participants’ visions of what a community looks like.
Those different images — a tree, a telescope, an outreached hand — are knit together into one cohesive visual. That’s literal: the mural depicts the Earth as a ball of yarn knit by a pair of hands into a flowing, heart-covered scarf in pinks and reds. With a few more sessions, the piece will be complete.
“We wanted to tell the story of who we are, and not just that we’re an art space but we are people across the board,” said Jessica Ruth Baker, the managing director of Radiant Community Arts.
This class, the first of its kind, was pitched by longtime Radiant instructor Chelsea Lovejoy, a Eugene muralist who recalled her first large-scale work of art as a piece she made when she was 11 years old. Lovejoy said she keeps joking that the Radiant students are going to steal her job because they’re taking to mural-painting so well.
“I think most people don’t necessarily consider what goes into conceptualizing a mural,” Lovejoy said. “We talked a lot about things that were important to us, and then once we had ideas like community and togetherness and interconnectedness and belonging, we sat down and we talked about, ‘How do we visualize a feeling or an emotion or something as big and complicated as community?’”
How a mural came together on Pearl Alley
On the morning of Wednesday, June 10, Melica Cramer was daubing hot pink paint onto the wall. Cramer, 27, started taking classes with the Oregon Supported Living Program when she was 18 years old. Her part of the mural was a bold, pink flower with a yellow center, a departure from the smaller scale mosaics and paintings she typically works on in the classes.
“Trying to do my own thing on the wall is really different from what I’ve done before,” she said. “Compared to working on a canvas, it’s way different.”
Next to the hot pink flower, a cartoon possum hung from a tree by its tail. That’s the addition of Eugene artist Kait Gliem, whose possum character is one of two signature artistic styles she applied to the mural. The other is her “dot style,” a take on pointillism made of stippled, massive colorful dots making up the tree’s foliage and pink flowers blooming within the branches.
“I chose the tree to encompass our community and provide that protection, that’s what it symbolizes to me,” she said. “Then I included my possum character, just because I’m goofy.”
This is the first of two murals that Radiant is planning.
Another class in the fall will tackle the opposite wall on the side of the St. Vincent de Paul-run Aurora Building, an apartment home geared toward lower income residents of downtown Eugene; Radiant occupies a space in that building’s ground floor.
One resident of the Aurora, Charles, stopped by during the Wednesday class to watch. Charles’ window overlooks the alley where the painters were at work. He didn’t want to be interviewed, but left a note to explain what the project meant to him. Charles hopes the mural project will create nice memories in a corner of Eugene where he’s seen some not-so-nice happenings.
“I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff out that window,” he wrote. “But recently what I’ve been seeing is students from the gallery beneath me painting a mural on the side of the public defenders building. And soon they’ll be painting the side of our building, ending with the two murals facing each other. It won’t only prevent tagging through the mutual respect of artists but lessen some of the unwanted events that transpire by simply giving people something beautiful to look at.”
